


a hero for the green and growing

by thesummerstorms



Series: Kast & Etain [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Kast's POV, Snippet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 13:47:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15730644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesummerstorms/pseuds/thesummerstorms
Summary: Kast Fulier has always been a hero, but a savior does not a teacher make.





	a hero for the green and growing

Kast Fulier has always been a hero. Dark eyed and handsome, the Force sings through him like a livewire, and he carries it his footsteps across a thousand battered worlds. He is a quiet hero, a small one, but when he walks, the flicker of the future is in his eyes, the visionary’s visions pouring from him like an aura. Passerby straighten around him, shoulders slowly uncoiling the weight of a weary galaxy. A smile from Kast, or a reckless toss of the dice- it doesn’t matter. He’s determined to set the path the Force has shown him, and very few are willing to get in his way.

Kast Fulier has always been a hero. The problem becomes what to do when all the rescuing is done.

A savior does not a teacher make.

The youngling in front of him is tiny, disheveled, a fragile-looking teenage girl, and the Force around her does not sing in the way he is used to. Something around her changes the mind-song he has always known, muting it to a hum, an echo. She is not powerful, the way Jedi apprentices fancy themselves to be, and in all likelihood, she never will be.  
Rhosaar would have laughed at the irony of that, he thinks, but his old Master’s blood dried, useless, in the belly of a slave ship some months before. She never lived to see her unexpected prodigy take a Padawan as forgettable as she herself had been in youth.

The girl- his new Padawan, Etain- looks up at him when she thinks he isn’t looking, and her face is pinched with something between relief and distrust, as if she expects at any moment that he will turn to her in disdain, as if she is in every moment remembering the weight of his voice as he stepped between her and the Council of Reassignment. Gawky and awkward as teenagers are, her hands fumble over the lightsaber at her belt. She turns to him, a wide-eyed flower tilting towards a new spring sun, and, flustered at some charming joke, some smile, shatters a glass tumbler across the rectory floor.

But it would be wrong to dismiss her too cheaply. If the Force is not a song in her, nonetheless he can feel its touch. It was the Force that lead him to save her, to hold her fast to the Order. He can feel it weaving between them, Padawan and Master, although he can’t begin to guess at the design.

And if the Force is not a song in her, he knows- he saw, with the sight the Force grants him and his lineage- that it will take a different shape. A different note. She is young and trembling and the Force has a path for her, a current in his mind’s eye.

The Force has placed him in that path, and he obeys as he always has, as he never has the Council. But the Force is frustratingly mute as he wonders what, precisely, he’s meant to do now that he’s here. He’s never fancied himself a teacher. Never meant, in truth, to take a Padawan. Rhosaar might have guided him once, but alone with this child he finds himself floundering, uncertain of what lessons she’s meant to learn. Of how he would begin to voice even the barest bones of the choirs the Force sings in his mind.

There is a delicacy to green and growing things that he’s never had the patience for.

It will be the first of many failures.

A hero does not a teacher make.

But from the moment he sees her, chin tucked down in defiance, eyes bright and fists clenched against the council, he begins to love her anyway.

He can only hope it will be enough.


End file.
